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Title: Community-Connect: COVID-19 Small Business Marketplace with Automated Regulation Matching and Company Lead Retrieval
Abstract—Periods of unique economic distress such as the COVID-19 pandemic can be quite difficult for small businesses. Challenges acquiring the supplies necessary to adhere to safety regulations created in the wake of such events can introduce stress on these businesses. This is further exacerbated when supply chains have slowed down, leading to global shortages from most large suppliers. This paper proposes a platform to aid such businesses in procuring COVID-19 related supplies such as Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) from one another, leveraging advanced data acquisition, integration, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods. With the pandemic end in sight, the platform described in this paper can be reused for other emergencies such as hurricanes, floods, among others. The proposed platform supports business transactions within a Buyer’s Club (BC), keyword-based sourcing of new businesses to join the platform, and matching products to relevant regulations using greater-than-word length encoding, helping businesses comply with the ever-changing regulatory landscape. Index Terms—COVID-19, Disaster, Natural Language Processing, Data Acquisition, Data Retrieval, User Interfaces  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2029557
NSF-PAR ID:
10339241
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE 22nd International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration for Data Science (IRI)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
57 to 60
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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